Living with Lewy Body Dementia
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease
Mike Oliver is an opinion columnist who has Lewy body dementia. For this column, he culls posts from his blog where he is counting down his 678 vinyl records to raise awareness of this deadly, common, but not well known form of dementia. Singer songwriter Peter Himmelman has a song about visiting a woman named Susan in the hospital. …
So what’s the last word? McCain John McCain said before he died, “I love you, I have not been cheated.” Wow. I love those last words as relayed by McCain’s good friend Sen. Lindsey Graham. McCain had left a written statement but these words spoken to Graham were the actual last words. My …
Continue reading “John McCain’s last words are right on (blog version)”
This is about breaking it down. All the way down. To the word. Word is John Archibald and Alabama Media Group won a Pulitzer Prize last week, awarded for a series of John’s columns that had words that often shined a light on injustice. It’s a huge deal in the journalism business to be given this, the …
Continue reading “Words matter, brain disease or not, Pulitzer affirms (blog version)”
There are two words I really don’t like. One of them is ‘merge.’ The sign on the highway orders drivers to merge. It sounds like a command, a rude command at that. Merge! We can’t all do it at the same time. But we have to do it. The sign says so. Now, what if …
Words fail me. Or should I say: I fail words. You know that feeling you get when you lean back on two legs of a four-legged chair and suddenly you realize you’ve gone too far? You know that feeling? A split second of feeling totally out of control? I feel like that all the time. …
Everyone has certain songs that take you back to another place and time, songs that trigger physiological changes in your body. These songs may conjure up ghosts, pleasures, anguish, and broken-hearted pain. They may be sad songs; they may be bad songs. They cast a spell on you. (Insert ‘Screamin’ Jay Hawkins here.) They may …
Let’s see. I type one letter at a time as I am now doing. So far so good. I have not been writing much lately. I am working on some other things. Certainly, I have not been typing like I did over the past five years, writing 678 reviews of each of my vinyl records, …
God came to me. That’s all I’m going to say about that in this moment. I am a man of fewer words.
I recently stumbled across a year-old tornado story from AL.com quoting a man, Sam Moerbe, about the devastation wrought by a tornado hitting Fultondale Jan. 25, 2021. ‘It looks like a bomb went off,’ Moerbe said. Reading that quote, I immediately thought of how many times as a reporter covering tornados have I’ve heard that …
Continue reading “‘It looks like a bomb went off.’ Helmets needed?”
That this war could be the backdrop to my own death disturbs me greatly. The horror is visual and visceral as brought in bytes and bits bounced off satellites. It really has me rattled. I was diagnosed five years ago with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disease characterized by memory loss and tremors. I’m …